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Social-economic sciences and humanities (SSH), as sciences devoted to the study of human societies and relationships in the broadest aspect, can provide us with new views on contemporary socio-political issues, like cultural conflicts. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines can show us how to resolve them, or even better, how to prevent them.
The topics included in the FET projects come from the whole spectre of current human knowledge, including biotechnology, green technology, nanotechnology, robotics - and among many others – also social sciences. This approach boosts the integration of SSH into technological and other innovative projects. Great examples of the collaboration are increasing innovations in social media and technologies based on interactive approaches. Social sciences inspire technologies and vice versa. Finally SSH disciplines are key for innovation as to develop an innovative product means also to make it prepare for use of the society.
SSH in FET projects
Current FET calls (Artificial Intelligence for extended social interaction and Environmental Intelligence ) include an important component of social sciences. Since the sixth Framework Programme, FET encouraged the cooperation between technology and social sciences with projects such as:
- EMIL: a project simulating the two way dynamics of norm innovation
- FP7’s SocialNets oriented to analyse the social networks in the context of exploitation of content, including issues of security and trust
- Socionical specialized on prediction and simulation methods for large scale socio-technical systems and
- CyberEmotions focused on the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up e-communities.
More recently, in Horizon 2020, the EU's Research and Innovation programme, the importance of SSH in innovation and research is not negligible. Under the Work Programme 2016-2017, more than 40 % of topics explicitly involved the use of SSH disciplines.
And the cooperation successfully continues. Currently, Horizon 2020 supports projects like:
- IBSEN developing a human behaviour simulator,
- TimeMachine working on a simulator mapping 2000 years of European History,
- POTION doing research on olfactory treatment for depression and anxiety,
- WeNet helping to overcome the persisting communication barriers in social networking.
ODYCCEUS
Another good example of the project combining SSH and STEM approaches in order to analyse behaviour on social networks is ODYCCEUS (Opinion DYnamics and Cultural Conflict in EUropean Spaces).
ODYCCEUS is an ongoing project, which started in 2017 and is based on global systems science approach. Its aim is to understand, spot and prevent cultural conflict in Europe, while capturing the related opinion exchanges, with use of technology that can realize the issue of meaning and has language at its core. For that reason, it uses textual analysis, linguistical theories, or game theory to detect the potentially growing cultural conflict e.g. on social networks, or in the internet in general.
The ground-breaking thing is that ODYCCEUS is not only a project built on synergy between technology and social science, but it also provides social sciences with a technological tool to make advance in the social research. The project developed a cloud-based open-source modular platform, called Penelope, which provides tools for computational social science, e.g. for visualization of the data collected from social media and other digital sources.
Moreover, the project includes also a portion of citizen science. Recently, the ODYCCEUS team presented a beta version of The Climate Change Opinion Observatory, which is intended to allow also wide (non-professional) public to monitor and visualize the dynamics of conflict situations that are taking place in the extremely trending debate about climate change.
Among participating organizations are research institutions and universities from Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, Netherlands and Belgium. The coordinating institution is the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.). Having such a strong academic background makes it ideal to generate various outcomes, including workshops and conferences. The next one is scheduled for 26th – 30th October 2020 in Leipzig.
More info
- The Net4Society report on SSH integration in FET
Background information
FET-Open and FET Proactive are now part of the Enhanced European Innovation Council (EIC) Pilot (specifically the Pathfinder), the new home for deep-tech research and innovation in Horizon 2020, the EU funding programme for research and innovation.